Architecture & Technology
Ivan Herman
Ivan Herman graduated at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, he joined the Centre for Mathematics & Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he had a tenure position between 1988 and the year of his retirement, i.e., in 2021. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1989 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands.
He joined the W3C Permanent Staff in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI, and has remained as an emeritus W3C team member since his retirement from CWI. As a W3C staff member, he served as Head of Offices until June 2006, then as Semantic Web Activity Lead until December 2013. He is currently the Publishing@W3C Technical Lead, as well as the W3C staff representative for the work on Publishing Maintenance and on Verifiable Credentials. He was also member of the Strategy, as well as the Technical & Architecture teams of W3C until 2021.
Before joining W3C he worked in different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but he spent most of his research years in computer graphics and information visualization. He also participated in various graphics-related ISO standardization activities and software developments. See his professional web site for further details, including his list of publications, presentations, and various social activities.
Ivan's Github account
Richard Ishida
Role: Internationalisation Specialist
Richard joined the W3C team in July 2002 to work on Web internationalization (i18n), serving as staff contact and technical contributor to the Internationalization Working Group. He was the Internationalization Lead, between 2004 and 2023. He was also a Strategy Specialist for internationalization, and created and led the highly successful MultilingualWeb EC project. After introducing education and outreach activities to the W3C Internationalization work, he went on to develop a framework for investigating and resolving gaps related to the support of languages and writing systems around the world. Semi-retired as of the beginning of 2024, he now focuses on that 'Language Enablement' work.
He serves on the Unicode Editorial Committee and the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group. For many years he also served on the Unicode Conference board, and has a Unicode Bulldog Award. He developed the W3C Internationalization Checker, and in his spare time creates tools and articles (such as UniView) to help people working with characters and scripts from around the world.
Richard has a background in translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, software engineering, and translation tools. Prior to joining the W3C, he was a Global Design Consultant at Xerox, providing services and training to external clients as well as to internal development teams with regard to the international design and localizability of user interfaces and documents. He received a corporate award for work on the Xerox product development process.
Yves Lafon
Yves Lafon studied Mathematics and computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France, and at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Montreal, Canada. His field of study was signal recognition and processing. He discovered Internet Relay Chat and the Web in Montreal in 1993 and has been making robots and games for both. He joined the W3C in October 1995 to work on W3C's experimental browser, Arena. Then he worked on Jigsaw, W3C's Java-based server, on HTTP/1.1 and started the work on SOAP 1.2.
Yves is now the TAG Team Contact and Web Transport Team Contact.
Chris Lilley
Role: Technical Director
Chris is, since 2008, a W3C Technical Director. He is also staff contact for the Audio, CSS, WebFonts and PNG Working Groups. His interests include advanced 2D graphics - both vector and raster - color management, online and multilingual typography. He is the W3C liaison to the International Color Consortium (ICC). He was for three years a member of the TAG and for many years co-chaired the Hypertext Coordination Group. He was awarded a Technical Emmy at the 73rd Tech Emmy awards in 2022, for his work on Web Fonts.
Chris joined W3C in 1996. He holds a BSc in Biochemistry, an MSc in Biological Computation and a postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics. Previously at the Computer Graphics Unit, University of Manchester in the UK, Chris has been working with Web technologies since 1993.
Michael[tm] Smith (sideshowbarker)
Role: W3C Japan team
W3C staff support for the WebAssembly Working Group and WebApps Working Group and the WICG. Maintainer of the W3C HTML Checker (validator). W3C rep for the Web Platform Tests project. W3C liaison to Ecma. Closely involved in WHATWG work (including many contributions to the HTML spec) since 2006. One of the core reviewers/maintainers for MDN Web Docs (4500+ reviews). Patch/code contributor to browser-engine projects: chiefly Ladybird (including ARIA and HTML-AAM support) but also Safari/WebKit (committer; contributions include the details@name exclusive-accordian implementation), Firefox/Gecko (mostly HTML parser contributions), and Chromium/Blink (minor patches, including V8 patch). Worked at Opera for a time back in the day. Elected moderator at Stack Overflow. Living and working in Tokyo.
Ralph Swick
Role: Chief Operating Officer
Ralph joined W3C in January 1997, to focus on the Privacy and Demographics project. As that project (now called P3P) was starting, Ralph also started the Metadata project. The Resource Description Framework became a full-time responsibility when the Metadata Activity turned into the Semantic Web Activity. In 2007 Ralph became the leader of the Technology and Society Domain and in 2009 was appointed Acting Chief Operating Officer. As of 2010 the 'acting' qualifier was removed. Then in 2022 Ralph was appointed as Interim Chief Executive Officer of the new W3C, Inc. In November 2023 when W3C's permanent CEO joined, Ralph resumed his role as Chief Operating Officer.
Ralph came to W3C from the X Consortium, where he was Technical Director for the X Window System. Ralph brings to W3C both a systems background and an application background. Long involved with the X Window System, Ralph was one of the architects of the Xt Intrinsics (user interface) toolkit.
Prior to joining the X Consortium, Ralph was a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Office Systems Advanced Development Group. There he worked on information filtering tools (software agents) and computer-supported cooperative work tools. Before that, Ralph was in Digital's Corporate Research Group working at MIT Project Athena. Ralph holds a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Ralph's interests are in applications of Web technologies to support human-human interaction, especially over time and distance.
